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Amid growing pressures to improve business performance, continuous improvement (CI) offers a way forward by focusing on incremental changes to achieve larger goals. As disruptions continue to reshape industries, CI leaders are more crucial than ever, sharing ideas and turning uncertainty into strategic advantages.
Enlighten’s new series, led by our CI Chief Lead Claudio Dalla Venezia, a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, delves into the concept of CI, its timeless relevance, and how CI leaders can unite teams around a shared purpose.
Unlock the power of CI for your organisation with our thought leadership series. Don’t miss out on this essential resource to navigate business disruptions, drive strategic transformations, and unite your teams around a shared purpose.
This three-part series explores the enduring relevance of CI, probes its nature as an art or science, and discusses how a CI leader can unite organisations around a common goal, all while highlighting the importance of robust CI strategies in today’s challenging business landscape.
From the Industrial Revolution's pioneering efficiency studies to the modern embrace of digital transformation technologies, CI has been a driving force for change. Today's methodologies, including Lean, TQM and Agile, have their roots in past innovations. The enduring thread throughout CI's evolution is the use of data to drive transformation, increase efficiency, and maximise ROI.
CI is a blend of art and science, requiring both analytical skills for data-driven decision-making and soft skills to inspire change. The scientific side involves process analysis and statistical testing, while the art of CI lies in emotional intelligence and storytelling. Striking a balance between these elements can help transform businesses, and CI can take any organisation from good to great.
In today's evolving business world, there is a critical need for leaders who foster a culture of CI, uniting teams around a shared purpose. This involves harnessing the power of storytelling, setting measurable goals, empowering team contributions, ensuring the right skills, observing processes firsthand, and celebrating progress.
Explore how Enlighten can help you build operational resilience and get ready for the future with a free consultation. Contact us now to book in a virtual coffee chat with one of our leadership team and learn more.
The crisis highlighted to the Northern Trust the need for being able to deliver their services in an appropriate time, despite the circumstances, and servicing customers sufficiently with a growing demand for their asset servicing and valuation offerings. To that end, they needed to understand their capacity, the cycle time on tasks, the work in progress and the load distribution at any particular time to be able to redeploy quickly and effectively.
Leveraging Enlighten’s solutions, the organisation was able to identify areas where staff could take over work usually performed by other regions. Geographical boundaries were no longer a concern with the remote working situation, and they were able to adapt to the crisis and leverage additional resources quickly.
Pete Cherecwich, President of Asset Servicing at Northern Trust, commented on the flexibility the Enlighten partnership allowed during a high-pressure time. “We’re sending work all over the place. For example, a lot of our asset servicing for the Australian market was performed from Manila in the Philippines. When that closed down, we moved it to Bangkok in Thailand, then to Chicago, and once the Philippines office implemented work from home measures, we moved it back to Manila,” he says. “If we know who has the capacity, we can move that workaround to maximise our output. So, if the volume in Asia is too high, we can have people in the US log in and pick up the slack.”
This is a strong example of a business that pivoted quickly, building operational resilience with a future focus and utilising strategic partnerships for greater agility during a disruption.
Learn more about Enlighten’s insights on operational resilience for the future here.
Nigel McCammon, COO APAC, The Link Group
The Link Group has turned the ongoing crisis around to see an incredible 6-12% increase in productivity over the last couple of months thanks to strategic use of the right tools. Tapping into Enlighten’s Single Source of Truth solutions, the organisation based their management strategy around meaningful metrics to drive outcome-based decision-making.
A critical turning point and Aha moment for them was in leveraging the tool’s in-built insights to demonstrate patterns that supported the focus on an elastic workforce. They realised there was significant potential in rethinking how they assigned capacity and leaned on external sources for support, and uncovered a newfound opportunity to harvest capacity from existing sources.
Nigel McCammon, Chief Operations Officer of APAC at The Link Group, speaks about the unique simplicity of Single Source of Truth, saying, “Sometimes the simplicity of the data in the right moment is all that’s needed to carry the message.”
He also highlights the critical importance of having not just visibility, but traceability in data. “There’s a subtle but significant difference in those two words,” he explains. “Visibility suggests observation of an individual’s activity, but traceability gives much more detail, like how our people spend their paid time or how our members and clients interact through the various mediums that we have in the business. Traceability is the critical enabler for us to make better decisions.”
Building on insights from Single Source of Truth, the company has been able to shift past crisis management into developing operational resilience, identifying four key pillars of capability to be strengthened: data integrity, risk and control, people and processes development and change delivery.
This is a game-changing example of an organisation that got ahead by investing in the right tools, designed to enhance their human element.
Get more of Enlighten’s insights on choosing the best-fit tech solutions for your business.
Annabelle Thompson, Executive Manager, General Insurance Sales & Service at Suncorp
When New Zealand announced the highest level of lockdown procedures starting on 25 March 2020, Suncorp had only just 48 hours to activate 100% remote work arrangements and ensure their employees had all the resources needed to stay work productively from home.
To pivot quickly, Suncorp leaned on Enlighten’s unique Single Source of Truth solutions, tapping into its insights to manage a remote workforce and drive decision-making.
With those insights, Suncorp came to a key realisation or, as we like to call it, Aha moment – that data is crucial to making better business decisions.
Annabelle Thompson, Executive Manager, General Insurance Sales & Service at Suncorp, stresses the importance of clear and comprehensible data in helping the company improve their decision-making process in a way that bolsters its bottom line.
“We use data to build business cases around what’s costing us, whether that’s lost time, drops in customer satisfaction, or whatever metric we may be measuring, and that makes it so much clearer for us to make good decisions,” says Thompson. “Now, we’re investing in process improvements in certain areas because of the data we’ve captured, and it’s helped me forward forecast demands and get my resourcing right for my team.”
In addition to providing straightforward data for better decision-making, Single Source of Truth also helps Suncorp manage their employees’ productivity. Clear visibility, regardless of location, has allowed the company to assess and manage their team’s performance, identify patterns and focus on helping their people be as productive as they could be.
“With data, we’ve built coaching more specifically around the needs of individual employees, rather than just using a blanket team approach,” she shares.
Suncorp is a great example of an organisation that champions the positives and appreciates that, with the right tools, a crisis can be an opportunity to create a better system of management for the future.
Get more of Enlighten’s insights on building operational resilience with a Single Source of Truth.
